Erstwhile, for those a bit distant from SAT Prep, means “former,” or “of long ago.”

I found the phrase in a New York Times Book Review of a new biography of Sigmund Freud.

In it, the reviewer, George Prochnik, referred to Jesus as “the erstwhile Son of God.” Clearly, I missed something.

Evidently I missed the spot in conventional wisdom where Jesus merited an asterisk in history, one of a number of lovable gurus whose assertions of divinity the cultural elite has definitively refuted.

That the phrase was employed and assented to by a series of editors and proofreaders with nary a “hey, isn’t that a bit presumptuous?” should set off alarms.

Evidently, The New York Times, a newspaper I otherwise admire, believes we are now a post-Christian society. So do The New Yorker, The Atlantic and any other number of left-leaning periodicals of the cultural intelligentsia. Commenting on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s subtitle of the new Michelangelo exhibit, “Divine Draftsman & Designer,” The New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl bristled at the use of the “archaism: divine.”

“It is hard now to use the word ‘divine’ in conversation,” he wrote, “or even to think it, except facetiously.”

Such is the smug disdain of the secular elite, who believe the faithful comprise a bunch of Hallmark-watching, prosperity-Gospel thumping sheep. Such scorn has long been borne by Christians, who have had that sort of derision spelled out from the beginning. “If the world hates you,” Jesus warns in the Gospel of John, “you know that it hated Me before it hated you.”

And yet Americans, born out of Christian dissent, have taken their hegemony for granted. They can’t any more. The share of Americans who identify as white and Christian has now dropped below 50 percent. White Christians, once the majority, now comprise only 43 percent of the population, according to the Public Religion Research Institute. Forty years ago, that figure was 80 percent.

To the surprise of no one who actually still attends religious services, the faithful are losing ground. And we all know the reasons. Ecclesiastical scandal, financial and sexual indiscretion and an abject failure to articulate a message that resonates with the faithful have all sapped the church’s power.

Even the numbers among that former limitless quarry of Christian renewal – evangelicals – have dropped from 23 percent to 17 percent of Americans in the last 10 years. Some observers, like columnist Ross Douthat, believe we may be heading for an “evangelical crackup.” As Baylor professor Alan Jacobs told him, “as far as I can tell, where young evangelicals are headed is simply out of evangelicalism.”

Many religious observers fear that the continued association of certain Christian groups with political allies whose vulgarity, acrimony and malice toward other Americans have been exposed will only exacerbate the trend. That would suggest, as Douthat has argued, that evangelical Christianity is less about theology than it is about what he calls “white Christian tribalism and a very American sort of heresy.”

The breaking point for many evangelical Christians, including Margaret Renkl and Peter Wehner, was the group’s embrace of Roy “Mall Rat” Moore for the U.S. Senate. Eighty percent of white born-again Christians in the state backed Moore, who faced accusations from at least nine women that he had sexually harassed or assaulted them when they were teenagers. “When faithful Christians vote for a man credibly accused of child molesting, something is terribly wrong with Christianity,” she wrote. “There is no skirting the damage they’ve done to their own moral standing.”

Christians, to invoke the old hymn, should be known by their love, not by their hate, their anger, or their resentment. They should be identified by feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, comforting the vulnerable and working as instruments of God’s peace. They should not be known for their embrace of suspected pederasts or their embrace of brutish sentiments.

The damage to the faith – and, sadly, to the values they espouse – cannot be underestimated. “The word ‘evangelical’ is already being discredited for an entire generation,” wrote conservative columnist David Brooks in The New York Times.

Likewise, our choice of leaders ennobles or disgraces us – and the community we represent.

“Assume you were a person of the left and an atheist, and you decided to create a couple of people in a laboratory to discredit the Republican Party and white evangelical Christianity,” Wehner, who had been both, wrote in The New York Times recently. “You could hardly choose two more perfect men than Donald Trump and Roy Moore.”

Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who served in the previous three Republican administrations, now believes that the “term evangelical … has been so distorted that it is now undermining the Christian witness.”

We choose our destiny, as Virgil said, by our choice of gods.

As a Christian, I take the recent dip of religious participation with deep dismay. At a time when we need Christians of good will to tackle material and spiritual poverty, the faithful must stand out for their mercy, compassion and witness, not for any political agenda.

If faith is to survive, its health depends as much on its practitioners as it is on religious leaders. No political party or denomination has a monopoly on scandal. Neither does any party “own” Christianity. .

As a Catholic, I am buoyed by the recognition that what saved the faith from dissolution was not the debauchery of the Borgia popes, but the illumination shed by the laity – people like St. John of the Cross, St. Ignatius of Loyola, St. Teresa of Avila and St. Francis of Assisi, all of whom wrought reform and renewal at a time when the official church was poisoned by its own iniquities.

We may be at a religious tipping point. Christianity may never regain what it has lost. But as long as it continues to be incarnated by people of compassionate hearts, who are moved not by transitory social or political movements, but by actions evocative of a higher love, Christianity will remain a vibrant element of this civic fabric.